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From The Militant, Vol. X No. 34, 24 August 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
MEXICO, D.F., Aug. 14 – An article viciously attacking Trotsky and his biography of Stalin, which is being published serially in one of the daily newspapers of this city, appeared in the July 18 issue of Todo, a Mexican weekly magazine. Signed by Hernan Laborde, one time secretary of the Mexican Communist Party, the venomous “review” repeats almost word for word the malicious slanders contained in a companion piece written by V.J. Jerome for the June 25 New Masses. (A refutation of this later article was carried in the July 6 Militant.) Such fidelity in the reproduction of lies leaves no room for doubt: the real author of both articles is Stalin’s loathsome GPU.
One of the Kremlin-hired killers, Charles Jacson, succeeded in murdering Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico, on August 21, 1940, six years ago, but the campaign to assassinate the great Marxist’s character continues unabated. Why? Because Trotsky was not conducting a personal, struggle for power, his physical destruction did not solve Stalin’s problem: assassination of the great revolutionist did not eliminate Trotskyist opposition to the Kremlin bureaucracy.
Stalin fears Trotsky’s ideas, disciples and organization – the Fourth International; Stalin still sees in them one of the greatest threats to the hated Soviet ruling caste. Hence, Stalin’s literary GPU agents are under standing orders to defame Trotsky’s role in the October revolution, and besmirch his character in the vain hope that they can erase the memory of his heroic record and eradicate the knowledge of his powerful ideas from the minds of workers throughout the world. They must falsify his great contributions to Marxism and deny that he was an untiring defender of the Soviet Union. They attempt to confuse workers, who are naturally interested in defending the conquests of the October Revolution, by identifying a political attack against Stalin and the bureaucracy which he dominates, with an attack on the Soviet Union.
This is a time-worn GPU formula and Laborde, like his fellow-agents in the United States, faithfully repeats it. He makes no attempt to discuss or refute the factual material presented by Trotsky in his book. Like Jerome in the New Masses, he deals only with slanders based on the Kremlin’s utterly falsified history of the Russian Party.
Both the literary campaign against Trotskyism and the present mass purge in the Soviet Union reveal, not stability of the Kremlin bureaucracy, but the regime’s growing fear of all political opposition, whether it be in Russia or abroad.
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